The marketing team behind the “Christmas Quality, Hanukkah Pricing” billboards advertising cheap vodka has sobered up and pulled the signs down from their West Side Highway and other locations. The joke — along with a picture of two dogs, one wearing a Santa Claus cap and the other a yarmulke — is that Chanukah represents a better “value” than Christmas. But the Anti-Defamation League didn’t buy it, saying the ads “reinforce anti-Semitic stereotypes … that Jews are cheap.” Brian Gordon of MGM, the company behind the marketing for Panache Beverage’s Wodka-brand vodka, laments the tendency of Jews, and he is one, and other minorities to perceive slights that aren’t there. It seems his client decided that in this case, perception is reality and that it had best, as the ADL urged, “consider a more appropriate message for the holidays.”
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